“Three kicks of a ball in our favour,” sighs Ciaron O’Hanlon. “I could have three Ulster medals in my back pocket. That’s just not the way it went. Wee small things cost us in three finals in a row.”
O’Hanlon retired over the winter. After giving 12 years to the Armagh jersey, he walked away having been lucky enough to raise Sam Maguire in Croke Park but never the Anglo-Celt Cup in Clones. He was part of the Armagh squad who made the last three finals in a row, coming away empty-handed each time.
“I can guarantee you that an Ulster medal will mean a lot to those boys in the Armagh dressingroom if they can win on Sunday,” he says. “It’s great to have the All-Ireland medal and nobody can ever take that away. The boys know we’ve done kind of back to front, in a way. But there’s no doubt we’ve come away from those Ulster finals disappointed. You need the rub of the green in sport.”
When you step back from it, Armagh’s Ulster final record is curiously – not to mention historically – bad. They sit alongside Cavan at the top of the list of final defeats, for example, with 23 against their name. The difference is that Cavan have come out on top in 40 finals, whereas Armagh have only won 14. The net distance between finals lost and won is greater for Armagh (-9) than for any other Ulster county. Only Fermanagh (-6) come close.
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They’re right up there in terms of losing streaks as well. Cavan are the only county ever to have lost four finals on the bounce, beaten by Antrim each year between 1908 and 1911. This Armagh side are one of only two teams in history to lose three-in-a-row – Down did it too between 1973 and 1975.
Even two-in-a-rows are rare enough. It’s only happened 12 times and has become increasingly rare in the past 60 years. Donegal were runners-up in 2015 and 2016 but before that, you had to go back to the Cavan teams of 1959 and 1960 to find the last one.
All of which is to say, this run of defeats in finals for Armagh is a complete outlier in the modern Ulster championship. Losing three finals in-a-row hurts bad enough. Losing all three after extra-time and two of them after penalties has to count as cruel and unusual punishment. As O’Hanlon says, having the 2024 All-Ireland tucked away in the middle of the run obviously softens the blow. But you wouldn’t want to overstate it either.
In the run up to the 2023 Ulster final, excitement in Armagh was higher than expectation. They had come through the soft side of the draw, accounting for Antrim, Cavan and Down along the way. It was also their first final appearance since 2008, a pretty wild statistic.
On the day they beat Fermanagh after a replay in 2008, Armagh had won seven Ulster titles in 10 seasons. Somehow, they promptly went a full 15 years without so much as making it back to another final. In that decade and a half, every other Ulster county apart from Armagh played in a final. To make it worse, every Ulster county apart from Antrim beat them at least once.
So as much as anything, 2023 was a flag planted in the ground. Dog days were over. Though Armagh brought their usual huge numbers and blinding colour to Clones that first year, Derry were the odds-on favourites on the day to defend their title. Nonetheless, Kieran McGeeney’s team played their part in a classic, one of those impossibly tense Clones days where there isn’t a gnat’s kneecap between the sides.
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Between the 30th and 73rd minutes that day, neither team managed to put two scores back to back. For a run of 13 scores in a row, the two sides traded alternating points. It was unbearably tight all the way to the end. And though Armagh twice went two ahead in extra-time, they ultimately succumbed to Odhrán Lynch’s heroics in the shoot-out, the Derry goalkeeper saving three of their penalties.
“We were just so deflated after it,” says O’Hanlon. “The tension all the way through it was huge. You could even feel it walking into the ground in Clones, everybody was so up for it. And then to lose it in ways you can’t really control, like a penalty shoot-out, we were so gutted.
“We met up the next day to watch it back. Plenty of boys didn’t really want to but we knew you had to. Not even to break down where it went right or wrong, more just to get it out of the system. We wanted to win something so bad.”
That’s the thing. We forget it now but Armagh’s reputation as recently as 2023 was the team who couldn’t get it done when the heat came on. In the space of 13 months, they lost two All-Ireland quarter-finals and an Ulster final, all in penalty shoot-outs. They also got relegated from Division One that year, losing their last two matches to injury-time scores from Galway and Tyrone.
You are who you are until you change who you are. They got to another Ulster final in 2024, only to lose another penalty shoot-out. It was Donegal this time, their ranks boosted by former schoolboy soccer international Daire Ó Baoill and former underage Finn Harps flyer Aaron Doherty. It might have been the last classic under the old rules – by the end of the year, Armagh were All-Ireland champions and football was changing forever.
Yet, here they are, still going after it. Stronger than ever, too. Any other team that had lost three provincial finals in a row would have you thinking they had a fatal flaw somewhere in their make-up. Nobody thinks that about Armagh. Sam Maguire changed who they were. They go into this one as heavy favourites to get it done. Finally.
“There’s a lot of youth in this current squad,” says O’Hanlon, who was one of half a dozen experienced heads to walk away over the winter. “This is a massive final for them. They have to get the monkey off the back, so they’ll have that motivation.
“But I think as well there’s a chance for them to cement themselves for the next few years and maybe go on a run like the boys in the 2000s did.
“It’s massive for Armagh as a county, with all the development going on. The county is on an upward trajectory and finally winning an Ulster title would be massive.”
